Michael Becerra is the Curation Manager of CopyPress. As a graduate from the advertising program at USF he is naturally passionate about content, creative ads, social media, and digital marketing. When he’s away from work, Michael enjoys watching sports, playing sports, and listening to good music.

Twitter is constantly working to improve the user experience while making marketing tools that help advertisers reach their audience more effectively. More and more marketers are beginning to realize the value of implementing Twitter into their marketing mix, and enjoy the process more with the new updates.

Recent upgrades include Twitters search filter, custom timelines, and features in niche markets, make twitter an appealing platform and leader in social media. The topics covered in this article can be utilized both by marketers looking to execute a social media campaign and the average user looking to get the most out of the platform.

Early in November, Twitter rolled out a new feature that allows users to create custom timelines based on their specific interests. These custom timelines allow you to curate tweets around a precise topic or moment by filtering out anything that doesn’t fall in that category. This is great for brands that want to focus on a specific product or promotion and for the average person to hone in on what they really care about.

There are two primary ways to create your own custom timeline:

TweetDeck: a free app helps users manage their twitter stream and allows you to individually curate a custom timeline.

The second way to create a custom timeline is open to a select few developers who can use Twitter’s API to create a sophisticated timeline.

If you are a die-hard fan of a specific show, (The Walking Dead for example) you can create a custom timeline that only features tweets related to the show, picking the most valuable and relevant content. The timeline is valuable for users that want to filter out clutter and for brands looking to showcase a specific product or event. This takes the emphasis off of Twitter as a content creation tool and puts it on curation.

Twitter updated its search capabilities with new filters that help users find the exact tweet you want, faster. These filters create a narrower search that eliminates the content you don’t want to see. You can now filter search to only see tweets from people you follow, newer tweets, or photos.

Twitter also allows you to filter through trends and events you want to know about. With so much activity on twitter, searching for the information or content you really want to see can be difficult. This new search filter aims to eliminate some of those hardships.

As the second screen trend grows so does the fact that Twitter is the ultimate compliment to television.

Earlier in the year, Twitter made a TV ad targeting program available for advertisers that would extend a brand’s message beyond the television screen and expose users on twitter to an Ad they may have seen while watching a specific program. This feature is now open for anyone looking to advertise on Twitter to use as advertisers can now target an audience based on TV conversations.

How does this work? Using conversation mapping technology, brands can promote tweets to users who have engaged with a specific show or program on twitter.

Anyone can use Twitter and follow who they please and consequently be exposed to tweets that are not intended for them. For advertisers, this is difficult and reaching their target audience becomes a challenge. This is especially an issue for alcohol companies who want to target a specific age group, so Twitter has addressed the issue by implementing an improved age-screening process.

When a user goes to follow an alcohol company they will need to enter their age in a filtering process. Once the age is confirmed the user receives a confirmation. There are several brands that have begun to integrate the new tool into their strategy, including Bud Light, Jim Beam, Knob Creek, Heineken and Bacardi.

More to Come

Twitter will continue to adapt and change as more users look to get more from the platforms and as other social networks create competition. These four features are the latest in many upgrades and changes that have happened and that are still to come.

We discussed how brands can take advantage of these features but users also have plenty to gain from the upgrades. Social media in general is built around the concept of staying connected with friends, meeting new ones, and contacting brands. These upgrades allow users to stay up to date while filtering out the clutter that’s easily created by the amount of traffic twitter generates.

About the author

Michael Becerra

Michael Becerra is the Curation Manager of CopyPress. As a graduate from the advertising program at USF he is naturally passionate about content, creative ads, social media, and digital marketing. When he’s away from work, Michael enjoys watching sports, playing sports, and listening to good music.

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